Originally in the mission ideas thread, the following sub-discussion came up:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9844.msg92585.html#msg92585Guardian powers are in rather short supply at the moment in terms of ones that do something other than just construct buildings. That's something that is just a factor based on it being early days, though, and not our end intent. Along with missions, adding to the guardian powers is something we want to do a lot of in the near future.
Just what are guardian powers for? Well, aside from the building-construction ones (which we are finished with, for 1.0), they are focused on one and only one thing: affecting the world in meaningful ways. Examples of this could involve opening a port, plopping down a wind shelter where you want, building a buoy on an ocean tile so that you can safely walk across it, weakening the overlord in some way, creating a mission that lets you attack and destroy "environmental threats" like the ice pirates, and similar.
To really come up with interesting guardian power ideas also requires some thinking about different obstacles that the overlord can put on the world map. So, for instance, if the overlord deploys some sort of army on the world map periodically, and that army has an ice-pirate-like effect of making nearby regions more difficult in some fashion, then a guardian power to deal with the army makes a lot of sense. But on the other hand, the game still needs to be playable if the army is never dealt with by a guardian power -- it just needs to be harder. You can play with the ice pirates bothering you constantly (indeed, there is no way to kill them at present), but killing them would make things a lot easier and thus is a worthwhile thing to be able to do via a guardian power.
We have a number of ideas on both of these subjects, but as I said in the missions thread: There's nothing like the power of a group of people all thinking about the topic from a variety of angles.
The rules:
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1. We're open to any ideas, but if it's really complex or requires adding tons of new functionality for just this one guardian power, the chance of it happening anytime soon are effectively zero.
2. The best ideas will take existing game mechanics and use them in new and varied ways. Adding in a few new mechanics as needed, of course (like we added the entire concept of environmental threats for ice pirates).
3. Even better ideas will work with a high degree of randomization -- ie, not requiring a specific combination of factors on the world map. In other words, if overlord armies can be placed anywhere, and might overlap with one another and with other environmental threats, then as more threats are added the combinations become a lot more varied and interesting. And thus the choice of which guardian powers to pursue in order to destroy those threats becomes more interesting, too.
4. For the most part, we're not looking to make the game easier than it is now via these guardian powers. There might be some exceptions to that, but in most cases what we're actually looking for here is a) new ways to control your environment (putting down a port or whatever), or b) new threats from the overlord that we can start seeding, paired with the guardian powers to neutralize those threats.
5. If you don't mind putting your ideas in mantis, rather than just lumped in one thread here, that would be awesome -- that way each idea can be archived if it's not going to be done immediately, and it can be discussed in its own thread whether or not it is being implemented next week or next year.
Fire away!
